SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced immediate
availability of the newest version of its FlashSoft server-side,
solid state caching software, which provides several notable
performance, usability and compatibility improvements for Windows,
Linux and VMware environments. In making today's announcement,
SanDisk also unveiled that its FlashSoft caching software will be
available in new bundled offerings that package the software with
SanDisk's array of enterprise flash hardware solutions, including the
Fusion ioMemory PCIe application accelerators, the Optimus
Ascend SAS solid-state drive (SSD), and the CloudSpeed Ascend
SATA SSD. These new offerings provide an easy-to-implement solution that
empowers customers to select the flash storage capacity and performance
that best meet their data center needs.
"We have built our enterprise flash business to offer the broadest range
of storage acceleration solutions to address customers' changing
needs," said Ravi Swaminathan, Vice President and General Manager,
Systems and Software Solutions, SanDisk. "The new hardware-software
bundles offer the best of both our hardware and software portfolios in a
single solution. We are excited to be able to offer customers a
complete solution that provides the performance and cost benefits of
flash technology, while at the same time making it easier for our
channel partners to support their customers."
A recent Gartner report indicates that "input/output (I/O) optimization
software alleviates the 'I/O blender' problem that often plagues dense
virtual machine environments and notes that these solutions can be an
inexpensive and non-disruptive way to boost application performance."
FlashSoft software does that and more. It reduces I/O latency in VMware
vSphere, Windows Server and Linux environments through the use of
server-side, flash-based storage caching, which helps increase
application performance in both virtualized and non-virtualized
computing environments. By utilizing server-attached flash storage as an
intermediate cache for an application's most frequently accessed data,
or "hot data," FlashSoft software enables that data to be read and
written more efficiently. The software assigns hot data to the
solid-state cache, increasing performance while reducing storage area
network (SAN) overhead. This prolongs the useful life of current server
and storage systems and delivers greater computing power, which
increases customers' return on investment (ROI), while reducing the
total cost of ownership (TCO) for their data center.
FlashSoft deployments have shown that server-side, solid state caching
provides substantial performance benefits to enterprise applications,
such as online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, online
analytical processing (OLAP) applications and high performance computing
(HPC). Most typical line-of-business applications such as Microsoft
Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and applications based on databases,
including MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle-will also see
significant performance increases through the use of the FlashSoft
software. Performance tests conducted by SanDisk using an industry
standard benchmark showed that the new version of FlashSoft software
increases application performance by over 14X compared to a baseline
storage array comprised of HDDs. Storage latency was also significantly
decreased, with application response times improving by more than 22X.
The latest version of FlashSoft software includes a number of
enhancements that help improve performance, compatibility and usability
for Windows, VMware and Linux environments, including:
- Windows Server:
- Improved support for Microsoft Hyper-V with Clustered Shared Volumes
(CSV) to provide caching for Hyper-V hosts sharing storage volumes.
- Native support for hard disk drive and SSDs formatted with 4K sector size as well as 512K.
- VMware vSphere:
- Certification by VMware as a Partner Verified & Supported Product
(PVSP), providing customers with peace of mind that their software
investment will have continued support and compatibility with VMware
vSphere as new patches and updates are released.
- Linux:
- Broad support for Red Hat(R) Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE kernels.
- Native support for HDDs and SSDs formatted with 4K sector size as well as 512K.
"SanDisk is an expert in solid-state storage and flash technology with a
decades-long history of delivering innovation in this market," said Al
Bibergall, Senior Vice President - Sales, Sayers Technologies. "We're
excited to partner with SanDisk to deliver solid state, server-side
caching that enables all the benefits of flash in an easy to acquire,
easy to support and easy to adopt package."
Packaging Software & Hardware Together to Increase Customer Value
SanDisk's new Cache Device Bundles combine its caching software with its
PCIe application accelerators and SAS and SATA SSDs to give customers
the broadest range of server-side, solid state caching options from a
single vendor. The new bundles deliver the benefits of flash hardware
and caching software in a single solution that is easy to evaluate,
deploy and support, regardless of storage operating systems or
architectures.
The new offerings include:
Windows Server Offerings:
- FlashSoft for Windows with Fusion ioMemory PCIe application accelerators
- FlashSoft for Windows with Optimus Ascend SAS SSDs for stand-alone Windows Servers or Hyper-V implementations
- FlashSoft for Windows with CloudSpeed Ascend SATA SSDs
VMware vSphere Offerings:
- FlashSoft for VMware vSphere with Fusion ioMemory PCIe application accelerators
- FlashSoft for VMware vSphere with Optimus 2 Ascend SAS SSDs
- FlashSoft for VMware vSphere with CloudSpeed Ascend SATA SSDs
Linux Offerings:
- FlashSoft for Linux with Fusion ioMemory PCIe application accelerators
- FlashSoft for Linux with Optimus Ascend SAS SSDs
- FlashSoft for Linux with CloudSpeed Ascend SATA SSDs
The new FlashSoft software and SanDisk Cache Device Bundles are
available for purchase now from SanDisk and its enterprise channel
partners.